Phil Hearse

The few weeks since Christmas have seen a number of landmarks, which together give us a flavour of the crossroads which imperialist militarism faces in the Middle East.

Reuters reported that in the first week of February more than 1000 people had lost their lives in Baghdad alone; in the face of such butchery nobody now bothers much to challenge the Lancet figure of maybe 600,000 Iraqi dead since the US-led invasion.

A week earlier the United States launched an attack on the city’s Haifa Street district in an attempt to wrest the area – just two and a half miles north of the heavily fortified Green Zone – from Sunni insurgents. Dozens of civilians were killed in the attack.

In the same period the number of British combat deaths in Iraq passed the 100 mark (132 overall). US combat deaths crossed the 3,000 mark, with another 47,000 wounded – many very seriously.

At least five US helicopters have been shot down in the areas of Sunni insurgency in the past few weeks, probably because the insurgents have acquired Stringer shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. As the Soviets discovered in Afghanistan, once guerrillas have this weapon, anti-insurgent operations become much more difficult.

In early February it was revealed that the US had sent $12bn in cash to Iraq to be disbursed to contractors and the Iraqi government, and that large amounts of it had disappeared without trace – into the hands of US contractors, corrupt US and Iraqi military officials, cynical Iraqi politicians – anywhere but to the Iraqi people and reconstruction. Unsurprisingly the Washington view of this biggest heist of all time is relaxed; the money was from Iraqi oil revenues, not the American taxpayer.

It is against this background that the US seems to be advancing towards a strategy of minimising its role in daily combat operations, while hunkering down in five or six super-bases, which nonetheless effectively control Iraq and its oil. The ‘surge’ of 21,000 in troop numbers is to prepare for this attempted withdrawal to the super bases by a futile attempt to crush the Sunni and Shi’ite militias.

While the slaughter in Iraq reaches apocalyptic proportions, the US naval and airforce buildup in the Gulf region has been proceeding apace, with the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk with its 75 combat planes reaching the area, as well as Patriot anti-missile missiles. Everything is being put in place for a possible air onslaught against Iran, with reportedly 10,000 targets being hit within the first few days.

According to SOAS academic Dan Plesch, “The evidence is building up that President Bush plans to add war on Iran to his triumphs in Iraq and Afghanistan - and there is every sign, to judge by his extraordinary warmongering speech in Plymouth on Friday, that Tony Blair would be keen to join him if he were still in a position to commit British forces to the field.

"There’s a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue - in the country and the world - in a very acute way," said NBC TV’s Tim Russert after meeting the president. This is borne out by the fact that Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships.”

After the catastrophe of Iraq, to many people it seems incredible that the White House could possibly be preparing a new war against Iran. To understand why this is a real possibility we need to turn to the annual World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. According to Time magazine the main discussion among delegates was the decline of US power, and the rise of China and India. It is exactly here that we need to look to understand the United States obsession with the Middle East, and indeed its new threats against Iran.

Declining US power has been a major theme in America foreign policy for more than 30 years. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the popular view was that American economic power was being challenged by Europe and Japan. Today there are even more actual and potential rivals.

The decision to deploy US military power, the one strategic asset in which the US out-performs everyone else combined, to try to maintain US worldwide economic and political leadership was taken decades ago. Today’s deepening militarist insanity is the playing out of that decision. But why exactly does that necessitate a military attack on Iran, with all the dangers that involves?

Part of it may simply be the hubris of the neocons in and around the White House, determined not to appear defeated in their war drive. Like desperate gamblers who place more and more unlikely bets to try to recoup their losses, they are looking for another route to military ‘success’. Bush has promised not to leave office (he leaves in January 2009) without preventing Iran being a nuclear state – and there seems little hope any voluntary agreement with Iran.

But there are more logical and thought-out reasons for a confrontation with the Ayatollahs. First, Iran is a revolutionary state – not in the sense that it is socially revolutionary (on the contrary), but in the sense that it is prepared to use armed force and armed proxies like Hezb Allah (‘Hizbollah’) in Lebanon and the Badr brigades in Iraq to confront and overthrow the present state system in the region.

In other words, despite all the talk of ‘constructive engagement’ with Iran from European leaders, or the idea that the theocratic regime can be domesticated by trade and the free market, the Iranian regime is unwaveringly committed to spread of Shi’ite Islam as the political organising principle for states in the region.

This inevitably makes Iran a long-term and permanent enemy of the United States and Israel. And it makes an Iran with nuclear weapons very hard to swallow in either Washington or Tel Aviv. The present military dominance of Israel in the region, which was not in any strategic sense broken by the recent war in Lebanon, is predicated on Israel being the only nuclear power in the region. Although Iran may take years to actually build a nuclear bomb, it is very near the ‘tipping point’ in which it has acquired all the necessary knowledge and technology to go ahead and develop its own nuclear bomb.

While some conservative American academics have recently challenged the power of the ‘Israel lobby’ and argued that complete backing for Israel harms overall US interests, [1] nobody in the leadership of either the Democrat or Republican party challenges the strategic alliance with Israel – and neither does any major figure in the State Department or the foreign policy elite more generally.

If the US wants to maintain its long-term alliance with Israel, back Israel as the dominant local power and keep its own economic and military role in the area, a nuclear Iran cannot be allowed.

To many its seems counter-intuitive or surprising that Bush and his team should respond to the political defeat the Republicans suffered in last November’s elections by actually prosing to deepen the militarist offensive in the region.

That discounts two things. First, the capacity of the neocons for self-delusion about the results of an Iran attack (or indeed military action more generally); and the appalling spinelessness of the US Democrats, who despite their majorities in both houses of Congress always end up supporting the warmongers, because they too are a party of millionaires who broadly support worldwide US militarism.

Apparently the US attack plan visualizes knocking out not only Iran’s nuclear capacity, but dealing a devastating blow to the Iranian military and maybe the country’s infrastructure as well. This, it is hoped, will undermine political support for the Ayatollahs and lead to a democratic upsurge led by the ‘Iranian opposition’.

In fact the results could be the opposite, with even Iranian dissidents rallying round the regime and reinforcing the power of the Mullahs. At the same time the Iranians will hit back with anything at hand. This includes firing missiles at Israel and using the Shi’ite Mahdi army and Badr brigades to attack US forces in Iraq.

According to a February 9 speech made by Ayatollah Khamanei, supreme spiritual leader of the country, “The enemy knows well that any invasion would be followed by a comprehensive reaction to the invaders and their interests all over the world.

“Some people say that the US president is not prone to calculating the consequences of his actions,” Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state television, “but it is possible to bring this kind of person to wisdom”.

State Television also reported on February 9 that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards successfully test-fired a land-to-sea missile with a range of about 350 kilometres. The firing came on the second day of war games by the Guards’ air force and naval divisions.

“We have successfully test fired a cruise missile called SSN4, or Raad, hitting targets 300km away in the Sea of Oman and northern Indian Ocean,” deputy air force commander, Ali Fadavi was quoted as saying.

“This missile has the final range of 350km and can hit all kinds of big warships in all of the Persian Gulf, Sea of Oman and northern Indian Ocean. It can carry a 500lb warhead and can fly at low altitude, evading radar jamming and immune to electronic measures.”

Despite all the possible terrible consequences, there are other attractive features for the US in attempting to militarily destabilise Iran and extend decisive US influence westward.

In effect the US military would be implanted in, or have decisive control of, a huge arc of territory from Iraq to Afghanistan. The US grip on the decisive western Asian part of the Eurasian landmass would be shored up.

The United States would not only control vast amounts of oil, but also the oil routes to Japan and Europe. It would threaten Russian and Chinese interests in the Caspian Sea basin. Potentially it could draw ex-Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan away from an alliance with Russia, which is daily strengthening its own military power.

The neocons’ plan for an Iran attack is apocalyptic. Unconcerned by the charnel house they have created in Iraq, they now happily contemplate an attack which would see hundreds of US (and maybe Israeli and Turkish) warplanes criss-crossing the country, attacking thousands of targets and inevitably killings untold thousands of Iranian civilians. This barbarism would inevitably strengthen political Islam massively and on a world scale. Numerous countries in the region would be caught up in the aftermath.

Many reports indicate that British special forces (the SAS presumably) are collaborating with US soldiers in secret missions inside Iran, designed to gather targeting intelligence. Britain’s navy and other services are fully collaborating in the Gulf build up.

British complicity or direct involvement in another American war –under Blair or Brown – is something that cannot be allowed to occur. The very threat of it should provoke a determined remobilisation of the anti-war movement.

NOTES

[1] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby, London Review of Books, March 6 2006.